“I miss her,” I said.

“Because you wish she’d take over again? Or because she’s your friend?”

Wendy wasn’t a friend. She wasn’t someone I’d go to in a crisis, and I would never confess my deepest feelings to her. But she’d been in my life since the beginning, and while we’d never spent the years together that most sisters do, each moment we had spent together glowed in my memory.

“Because she’s my sister.” I saw an opening to ask about Wendy’s scrapbook. “Wendy had a lot of friends, though, didn’t she?”

“She had her share.” My mother put the raspberry ice back in the freezer and unwrapped the plate of cookies.

“I was looking at some of her old school photos. Are any of her friends still in town? Did she get together with them when she came back?”

She hesitated long enough to make me curious. Had Wendy had a falling out with a classmate that Mom didn’t want to get into with me? From years of doing interviews I could tell when somebody was trying to hide something from me. Now I really was curious.

She shrugged, as if to say none of this was important. “One of her friends from the drama club is now the assistant principal of Seabank High. I can’t remember her name. I don’t know that they ever got together after Wendy moved into the town house, though. Your sister was never a best friend kind of girl. She was nice to everyone. She was popular, but she wasn’t in any cliques, never one of the mean girls. Of course you never were, either.”

“But I had best friends. Just a few. That was all I needed.”

“Wendy had a wide circle. Friends in drama, the band, the church youth group. It seemed like she brought new friends here as often as old.”

“Well, there was one girl who kept showing up in the photos.” I’d remembered to bring the snapshot I’d taken from the scrapbook, and now I pulled it out of my pocket and held it for her to see. “Is this the principal?”

Mom took and studied it. Her expression changed, and she shook her head. “No, that’s Greta. Greta Harold.”

I was impressed with her memory. “There are a lot of photos of her.”

“I was wrong to say Wendy never had best friends. She and Greta were best friends all through middle school. But Greta’s probably the reason Wendy didn’t have best friends in high school.”

“A nasty fight?”

“No. She died just before Wendy went into ninth grade. Your sister was distraught for months.”

Before I could ask more, my father came into the room. “Need help carrying dishes?”

Mom’s expression lightened, as if she was glad to leave that particular piece of history behind. “You just want your dessert.” She handed him a bowl with two cookies along the side, and picked up two more.

“Ready?” she asked me. “You loved this movie.”

I followed behind with the remaining bowls, but as I settled into a leather chair and balanced mine on my lap, I thought about my sister and the trauma of losing a best friend at such a pivotal moment in her development.